Plastika Alaska

GYRE:THE PLASTIC OCEAN

In 2013 Andy Hughes was invited to join an expedition journey along the wild Alaskan coastline. The Anchorage Museum and Alaska SeaLife Center partnered to take an international team of artists, scientists and educators to the Alaska coastline to observe, document, make art works and collect marine debris.

Andy Hughes

Andy Hughes photographic work explores the littoral zone and the politics of waste. He is one of the first artist photographers who explored plastic as metaphor, subject and pollutant. In the mid 1980’s whilst at Art School, he learned to surf and was concerned about the increasing levels of human sewage and plastic he observed in the sea. In 2013 he travelled to Alaska as invited artist with international team to work on the project GYRE: The Plastic Ocean. He was the first Artist in Residence at Tate Gallery St. Ives and short-listed reserve artist for the Arts Council England Antarctic Fellowship

Glasto Opus

Glasto Opus

In this recent work, Glastonbury Opus 1, Hughes explores tensions between the seductive depiction of colour and seemingly sculptural forms with the underlying narrative story of a type of environmental degradation that results from a festival event.